


The Worst Job Ever

by GenerallyHuxurious (GallifreyanOmnishambles)



Series: Huxurious Huxloween [4]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Alcohol, Alternate Universe - Ghost Hunters, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Dolls, Food, Haunting, M/M, Paranormal Investigators, Possession, Slaughterhouse mention, implied animal death, mermaid
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-04
Updated: 2016-10-04
Packaged: 2018-08-19 12:07:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8206841
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GallifreyanOmnishambles/pseuds/GenerallyHuxurious
Summary: Set in The Eldritch Effect universe. Spooky ghost stories don't really work when you're lazing around the pool on a tropical island... [For Huxloween Day 4]





	

“So,” Datoo began, fastidiously spreading out his towel as he spoke, “What’s the worst haunting you’ve ever seen then?”

  
Hux glanced over from his sunlounger, though it would have been better termed a shadelounger since the only way he could have gotten further out of the sun would have been to go inside the house entirely.

  
“Define ‘worst’?”

  
There was a splash as Kylo came to an abrupt halt against the side of the pool making Hux growl at the unexpected shower of salt scented water. Kylo threw another handful at him, using his talent to ensure it clung together and hit Hux full in the chest.

  
Hux gave him the finger.

  
“Oh I’d definitely say Dopper is the worst, he’s fucking awful at it.” Kylo snorted at his own cruel joke.

  
“Leave him alone, it’s not like he wanted to be stuck there all that time.”

  
Rodinon drifted over, his huge paddle-shaped tail undulating slowly below the water. Hux marvelled, not for the first time, that Datoo had actually managed to get a manatee merperson all the way from Florida to Hawaii and into a large private swimming pool without attracting attention. Apparently the man’s midlife crisis had consisted of buying part of a tropical island, renovating a 45 foot yacht and falling in love with a non-human. Hux had wisely chosen not to comment on the arrangement when Kylo had started talking about his classic car and Hux realised he was one beach hut from being in a low budget remake of the same situation.

  
“What are we talking about?” Rodinon asked with a look of puzzled interest.

  
“Hauntings. That’s when the spirits of the dead linger in a place or object beyond their time.” Kylo added when the large solemn face failed to register any kind of understanding.

  
“Do humans do that a lot?”

  
“Not really,” Hux said with a shrug, “it tends to be just negative energy more often than it’s some specific person loitering about the place. Everyone thinks it’s all ‘what ho! I’m the ghost of Oliver Cromwell and I’m here to make your life miserable because I’m still pissed off about the Catholics!’ but more often than not it’s just confusion and sadness and fear all compressed into one little bundle.”

  
“Hey, you just told me to leave Mitaka alone!” Kylo cried with mock indignation.

  
“Oh ha ha.”

  
“Have you ever had a genuinely frightening haunting though?” Datoo pressed.

  
Kylo looked uncomfortable, ducking his head under the water to hide his reaction.

  
“Uh well, mine would be the doll shop,” Hux said a little hurriedly as he tried to cover for Kylo. “When I was at uni I worked in the Shambles in York. That’s a 14th century street that was used as a butcher and slaughter district for centuries. All the buildings are tiny wood beam things that overhang on the upper storeys. Some of them are so close together over the street you could have climbed from one window into another. That made the shops below really dark and dismal but tourists love it.

  
“Now considering that this street literally ran red with blood for centuries it’s not a great place to work if you’re more… sensitive… to the world around you.” Hux continued with a shudder. “It’s not so bad when the tourists are filling the place with distracted enthusiasm, but in the early autumn mornings when it’s dark and there’s still frost on the ground- then it gets oppressive.”

  
“Frost?” Rodinon interrupted.

Beside him Kylo raised his eyebrows, surprised that that was the item in this narrative that confused the odd creature.

  
Leaning across from his own lounger Datoo tapped the mini fridge that held their alcohol supply. “The cold white stuff that develops in here. In northern countries it appears on outdoor surfaces in winter, or falls from the sky as ‘snow’.” He said gently, before turning to his guests. “Manatees can’t survive under 20°C for any length of time.”

  
In the pool Kylo had the decency to look slightly abashed.

  
Hux made a note in his phone to update the information on Rodinon in his aquatic cryptids notebook. “Anyway, I ended up working for a company that sold porcelain dolls. Do you have do…”

Rodinon nodded. “We don’t make them but we find them in the estuaries sometimes and adapt them for the younglings to play with. Go on.”

  
“Most of these dolls weren’t suitable for children. Hell, half of them cost more than my first second-hand car. Horrible Victorian things in floofy dresses and bonnets with these dead glass eyes. Hyper realistic babies inexplicably dressed as bumblebees. Unbelievably racist “traditional” soft toys that I did my best to hide at the back of the shelves. Every single surface in the place was filled with dolls. Like I said the buildings are small, so the mainroom was maybe ten feet square and the ceiling height was just under six feet, with maybe two hundred dolls on display.”

  
“But, Donal, you’re 6’1”...” Kylo interjected, clambering out of the pool to retrieve a beer for himself and the watching merperson.

  
Hux ogled him, his thought process utterly derailed by the inadvertent display of glistening muscles. After a moment he reached down for the folded towel beside his lounger and dropped it onto his lap.

  
With a knowing look Kylo shook himself like a dog, splattering the redhead with more water.

  
“Yeah, like I said, it wasn’t a great job.” Hux glowered but went back to his story. “I spent most of it sitting by the till, huddled over the electric space heater. Anyway, the haunting. These buildings have been there for five hundred years. They’ve survived through war and famine and the black death. There’s going to be a lot of psychic energy around just as a result of them standing so long. The whole city is like that. There are ghost walks for the tourists and various pubs claiming to be the ‘most’ haunted. So, it wasn’t a surprise when two weeks into the job I unlocked the shop to find all the dolls rearranged.”

  
Hux had sat forward into what Kylo liked to call his ‘melodramatic narrator’ pose. The effect was rather ruined by the brilliant tropic sunshine and the man’s skinny, sunburnt chest.

Kylo decided to make it worse by handing him a bottle of Kona beer with a curly straw and a paper umbrella crammed into the neck. Hux rolled his eyes but continued his narrative, occasionally waving the ridiculous bottle for emphasis.

  
“At first I told myself it was the owner moving stuff when he did stocktakes at night. I mean, it wasn’t as if they were posed with knives raised or anything specifically threatening. They were just in a different order and all - always - facing the till. ALWAYS.”

  
The straw made a slurping noise as Hux took an unsteady drink. Kylo snickered to himself where he sat on the sun-hot tiles beside the pool, watching a gecko run across one outstretched foot.

  
“I didn’t even mind dolls when I started working there. I didn’t understand why anyone would spend a month’s rent on one but they didn’t creep me out. Still, imagine 200 blank faces watching you for eight hours a day three days a week. Even the ones that were supposed to look like they were sleeping… or dead,” he added, a shiver going up his spine. “Even those ones seemed to be watching you.”

  
Datoo frowned, unimpressed. “That really doesn’t sound all that bad. I was expecting something like the Blair Witch Project.”

  
Closing his eyes Kylo jumped back into the water, the waves he created rolling Rodinon’s bulk across the pool. The odd creature didn’t seem to mind, he just expertly held his beer out of the water and smiled.

  
“I haven’t finished,” Hux continued peevishly. “One year the Minster and the tourist board decided to host this lavish Harvest Festival weekend. Food trucks, farmer’s market, cooking demos- anything you can think of to do with food and you would have found it that weekend in the city. Anyway, this one guy thought that the best way to advertise his business selling unusual meats would be to lead a goat around the city with promotional signs over its back. Which was weird enough to begin with, but there I am, sitting in this dark little shop watching this animal triptrap past when there’s this awful noise. Like nails on a chalkboard times two hundred. Everything in the shop turned to watch it.”

  
He rotated slowly in his seat, his arms held at strange angles and his eyes blank and staring. “Like that.”

  
“What, right in front of you?” Datoo asked, trying not the laugh at the impression.

  
“Yep. I genuinely thought that was going to be the moment died. They'd never moved before. Then goat moved out of sight and everything toppled over in the same direction. I got hit in the head by about twenty of the damn things. And they're heavier than you'd think. Anyway, that’s when I worked it out.”

  
“I don’t get it.” Kylo said a little petulantly.

  
“Slaughterhouses used to use Judas Goats to lead meat animals to the slaughter. They’d see an animal confidently walking into a building so they’d follow with no idea that only the goat would come out the other side.”

  
Datoo did laugh then, shaking his head in disbelief. “So all those dolls were haunted by…”

  
“Yep. Cows. Think how many animals would have gone through that street everyday over a period of three hundred years or so. And we were selling about thirty dolls a day.”

  
Hux finished his drink with a devious inward grin. “When the Commandant’s doctor told him to cut out red meat and my dear malevolent stepmother started feeding him more steaks rather than less, I convinced him to buy her a very fancy, very expensive doll for her birthday. She hasn’t cooked an edible steak since.”

  
“Oh my god.” Datoo said.

  
“Huuuuuuux,” Kylo whined from the pool. “Huuuuux. why’d you have to talk about steak?! I’m so huuuuungry.”

  
“We ate two hours ago.”

  
“Exactly.”


End file.
